Aseem Mehta

Aseem Mehta is an advocate focused on matters of racial and economic justice. As a Fellow with Immigrant Justice Corps, he defended immigrants from deportation in New York and South Texas. His advocacy work connects legal strategy with narrative journalism, documentary film and digital campaigns. While representing detained refugee families in Dilley, TX, Aseem designed systems for incarcerated refugees to deliver firsthand testimony about the conditions of their confinement to national media outlets, building momentum for related litigation.

As a Non-residential Fellow with Stanford’s Center for Internet and Society, Aseem worked with Professor Van Schewick and Valarie Kaur to facilitate a campaign to bring faith leaders and interfaith organizers to the forefront of the fight for “net neutrality” – the legal protection of a free and open Internet. As the director of the Yale Visual Law Project, Aseem co-directed documentary films on solitary confinement and immigration detention to provide a platform for grassroots organizers and affected communities to speak to new audiences in new spaces, including film festivals, museums, universities and legislative chambers. He has conducted research on prison policy reform as a Liman Summer Fellow at the Vera Institute of Justice in New York, and digital privacy as a Humanity in Action-Pat Cox Fellow at the European Parliament’s Legal Affairs Committee in Brussels.

Aseem graduated from Yale’s Ethics, Politics & Economics program magna cum laude where his thesis, an analysis of the expression of political voice by undocumented communities, was awarded the Hume Prize for the best joint empirical and theoretical approach to understanding public policy. He is a J.D. candidate at Yale Law School.

The government’s approach at the edge of our nation, our southern border, mirrors the way we think of the edge of our own consciousness: a dark place to hide our most absurd and troublesome secrets.

Since December 2014, the government has paid millions of dollars to a private prison corporation to operate what may be the world’s largest internment camp for asylum-seeking women and children. Nearly 2,000 mothers and their young kids, fleeing persecution and seeking protection under international law, are currently caged and abused by our government in southern Texas.

On the evening of Friday July 3, we became aware of a particular incident of our government’s systematic mistreatment of hundreds of young, captive children and their mothers. A spokesperson for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) noted that about 250 detained children were administered adult doses of the hepatitis A vaccine in an immigration detention camp in Dilley, TX. The agency was quick to minimize this mistake, immediately asserting that “no adverse reactions are expected.”

The public movement to protect a free and open Internet is approaching a critical moment this week: on February 26, the Federal Communications Commission will vote whether to pass strong rules against corporate control of the Internet.

"“When you consider the claims being made here, this is five clients, but they really represent the more than 3,000 folks that have been processed through these massive internment camps through this past year,” Aseem Mehta, a fellow at the immigrant advocacy group Immigrant Justice Corps, told ThinkProgress. “These five cases that were highlighted are just examples of what the government’s been doing to women and children detained, but it’s by no means unique. These are hundreds of other cases.”"